“A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. ‘I shall be yours,’ she told him, ‘when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.’ But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.”
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, 1977
“When a person has arrived at a stage in life when he accepts the inevitable with equanimity, when he has tasted good and bad to the full, and has carved out for himself alongside his external life, an inner, more real and not fortuitous existence, then it seems my life has not been empty and worthless. Even if my external destiny has unfolded itself as it does with everyone, inevitably and as decreed by the gods, my inner life has been my own work, with its joys and bitterness, and I hold myself alone responsible for it.”
“…I no longer made any distinction between pleasure and pain, but one was similar to the other; both hurt and both were precious. Whether my inner life went well or badly, my discovered strength stood peacefully outside looking on and knew that light and dark were colsely related and that sorrow and peace were rhythm, part and spirit of the same great music.”
Hermann Hesse, Gertrude, 1910
“Laila came to Qays while he was crying out for her, ‘Laila! Laila!’. She said, ‘Here I am; I am Laila!’ He responded, ‘I am too busy with my love for you to busy myself with you.’”
Shaykh Muhammad Sa’id al-Jamal al-Rifa’i,
The Path To Allah, Most High
“Modern man lives in a private world of his own, enclosed within himself, and modern symbolism is not objective: it is private; it does not obligate. The symbols of the kabbalists, on the other hand, did not speak only to the private individual - they displayed a symbolic dimension to the whole world.
The question is whether in the reality in which today’s secular person lives, this dimension will be revealed again.
I was strongly criticized when I dared to say that Walt Whitman’s writings contain something like this. Walt Whitman revealed in an utterly naturalistic world what kabbalists and other mystics revealed in their world.
Today we are living in an altogether different time. Technology is proceeding - leaping - forward with great strides, but the problem remains.
If humanity should ever lose the feeling that there is mystery - a secret - in the world, then it’s all over with us.”
Gershom Scholem, 1976
On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays
“Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we acquire knowledge.”
Daniel Tammet, 2011
source: TED talk
“…we have made far too little fuss over the fact that we count the word ‘soul,’ ‘spirit’ as part of our own educated vocabulary. In comparison to that, it is a trifle that we don’t believe that our soul eats and drinks. In our language a whole mythology is laid down.”
Wittgenstein, 1949
remarks on Frazer’s The Golden Bough, quoted in Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality
“Learn at first concentration without effort; transform work into play; make every yoke that you have accepted easy and every burden that you carry light!”
anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot, 1985
